


Every bite of it

by DaniP



Series: Hades and Persefone short stories [3]
Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Genre: Ancient Andean Religion and Lore References, Angst, Angst and Romance, Author Is Sleep Deprived, Biblical References, Covid references, F/M, Female Hades (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Hades Needs a Hug, Hades is done with humanity, Happy Ending, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Long-Distance Relationship, Long-Term Relationship(s), Male Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Married Life, Mythology References, Not Beta Read, Post-War, Pre-Zombie Apocalypse, Self-Indulgent, Sorry Not Sorry, War, Zombies, author is so done with humanity, author tends to curse, drug addict Persephone, false alarm there is no zombie apocalypse, good zombies, long life mango trees, nervous Hades, persephone needs a hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 23:21:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29600274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaniP/pseuds/DaniP
Summary: Hades is so fucking happy; she is gonna get rid of the noisy neighbors!
Relationships: Hades/Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Humanity/Stupidity, Zombies/Trees
Series: Hades and Persefone short stories [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2170830
Kudos: 3





	1. Time for consequences

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I am not native English speaker, so if you find any mistakes please let me know. And if you like this please also let me know.

Long distance relationships are utter shit. There is just one person missing, but it feels like the essence of the world went away with them. There are forms and sounds, smells, colors, textures; but what is that worth for? What can you possibly do with soulless carcasses? Where is the joy in an empty vessel?

But that can’t be. Things as big and ancient as the world don’t easily change overnight. A flower can wilt and perish, a bird can sicken and die, a rock can break and fall; but the forest wont wither, the fauna won’t be extinguished, the mountain won’t collapse.

Maybe the soul that’s missing is yours. 

Maybe the one unable of enjoyment is you. 

Maybe you shouldn’t have given your love away, because now, there is nothing left inside for you to use.

What happened whit that indomitable woman? The one that was alone against the world, that feared not the mist wrapped peaks nor the treacherous labyrinths, but that it wouldn’t be enough to quench her thirst for adventure, the pull towards those impossible, unconquered dreams. Don’t you feel she’s being enchained and forgotten? Enslaved to an archaic conception of happiness and completion?

Don’t you miss yourself?

And that’s why long distance relationships are unbearable and fragile contradictions. Your own mind brings out your dusty fears and insecurities, and plays them in repeat like a broken record. Its low, petty and fake, an obvious trick of loneliness and longing. 

So, Hades does what she knows will shut all the insidious little voices out, what will refute their baseless, wicked arguments. She started this little routine one starless night so many decades ago, and it has never failed to ease her unsteadiness, wash the dread away, even if tonight seems particularly difficult. She throws the sheets away, grabs the phone, and jumps in her fluffy slippers, headed to the kitchen. 

One of the most problematic downsides of a big house is the distances. Night walks through a dark house are open invitations for dumb accidents, like striking your pinkie toe against furniture. That hurts, even in hell. Erebus is not exactly hell; she thinks as she opens the cabinets of the countertop in search for tea bags. Hell is more like a part, a section; chamomile is over… ahhh, great. She’ll make do with lime and valerian, fucking Satan has it so much easier. She grabs her fancy tea set, candles, the tea bags, fixes all in a tray and heads to the greenhouse. There is a mess left in the kitchen for tomorrow morning… the maid will deal with it. The perks of godhood.

There is always something cathartic in comfort routines. Like your mind predisposes itself for the release of tensions. You think, after this, everything is going to fall back into place. But her anxiety is seriously playing a good one tonight. It might be nothing, just the overthinkings of an exhausted mind. Humans dismiss this kind of things as stress or tiredness without a dust of remorse. But gods know better.  
All living, dead, feeling, unfeeling things are connected. Bound by the energy of their relation. A god is bond to the subjects and objects of their domain, and to the place itself; members of a family are bond by blood and traditions; life is bond to death by reciprocity and essence, lovers are bond by desire and volition. And those invisible forces; that condensed energy, accumulated for hundreds of years; that humans give in their prays and offerings is what gods are made of. 

And thus, when there is a disturbance in a god’s mind, generally means that some string is being pulled. The queen of the underworld reigns over the dead, in an invisible kingdom of somber and darkness, there is little that can affect her; and because of that, the few things that can pull those strings are extremely valuable.

When Hades finally reaches the garden under a crystal dome, her hands are shaking.

She goes to a patch of grass under a mango tree. Mango trees are enormous, they grow slow, but can reach up to thirty meters if they have to fight for light. This is not so big, but has really low branches that make her feel protected, embraced by the essence of her beloved, distant boyfriend. They planted this tree together. 

She tries to fix her nervous breathing. takes big breaths, holds it in, and releases. And repeats. That gives her enough stability to start a little fire, light a candle and put it under the kettle. The water will boil in 5 minutes, then she’ll have to wait two minutes, and that’ll be it. Everything is going to be fine. She’ll drink a cup of tea under the mango tree and whatever is that is making her feel this anxious will banish away with the fumes of the lime and the valerian; inconsequential, unimportant, irrelevant, and some other boastful synonymous she can’t think of right now. 

Just seven minutes.

She brings her knees under her chin, embraces her legs and closes her eyes. Seven minutes will run fast. Everything is going to be fine. 

Six minutes. Fine. 

Five minutes. Everything. 

Four minutes. Every little… The phone rings.

Shit. 

Its Persephone. The ball of cotton in her chest gets wet with some thick poisonous dread, drips through her ribs and solidifies. She’s not breathing. She isn’t moving.

Persephone never calls her this early in spring. He gets absorbed by the interminable amounts of work. The bare trees wail hysterically, cry his name in supplication and desperate agony. And he loses himself in a mayhem of sprouting foliage and blooming life, an unrestrained bacchanal of flourishing greens and flowers. Or at least he used to, until a few years back, when cities started growing and devouring all around then like starved, insatiable titans.  
Forests begun dying meteorically fast; used like filthy whores to quench the golden lust of humankind. The soils were tainted, defiled, enslaved by the greed and corruption of men. The prairies were filled up with concrete and steel like breeding rabbits. Nature was raped like never before in an endless, gory and utterly brutal orgy of disdain and stupidity.

The pulse of the Earth became dimmed and Persephone wilted with it.

After that, every year she has to send him away to war. A desperate, futile, chaotic war that drains and destroys him. Trees can’t defend against saws or axes. Trees are exposed and helpless, martyrs of Artemis.

And he can’t cope. 

She grabs the phone in a hurry. Her hands are shaking again, uncontrollably fast. The answer button is playing a sick game with her because it doesn’t connect the call. Doesn’t connect. Does.  
Not.  
Connect.  
Connect you fucking excuse of human invention!

When finally, Persephone’s face appears in the screen, she crumbles under the bloody flags. His eyes are crimson red, his pupils are full moons of delusion, and he is abnormally relaxed and happy. He tells her all about his day; about sickening trivialities, about devastating realities that are depressingly common. His voice has the energy of playful children and the rhythm of a dying heart. He tells her “the world is collapsing and I’m fading away with it” all smiles in rapture. 

And she smiles back all cracked inside. This shouldn’t be happening. He was clean. He was free and healthy. They spend months washing away all the shit in his system. They discussed so much, talked, cried. But toxic slut is back. 

When the call ends and the phone screen goes black. Hades is completely still. She stays like that for hours, watching the endless, soundless void. Persephone is the end and beginning of her existence. She has given herself completely and irreversibly to him. And she can’t see him like this anymore. Watch life leaking away of him, like pollution slowly eats his spirit. She can’t stand by and do nothing to save the one bright and pure thing that’s left in the world. Even if the consequences destroy the core of the religion that birth them both. 

When morning comes, the void has spoken to her. 

There are things she has to do now. 

So Hades takes a deep, deep breath and stands up. Humanity has feared her for millennia. She is the cruel and merciless goddess of the dead. The unkind queen of the underworld. She is inflexible and just. 

Until today. 

Today she is going to fulfill all the prayers to her name. She is going to give humanity all their fallen brothers and sisters back. All those forsaken children will be reunited with their parents. 

Death has a funny effect in the soul, humans in their headless pursuit of pleasure are surly going to enjoy it. Makes life seem like a drug. A potent, inescapable, consuming desire awakens and drives then straight towards insanity. To a voracious appetite for life. 

Every bite of it.

They would just require a tangible body. But that’s not problem at all, Earth is full of corpses for them to take. Now is even better. There are corpses everywhere. Hospitals, streets, houses are full of dead bodies these days.

Humans shouldn’t pay with things out of their control. Shouldn’t touch and corrupt the sacred domains of gods. Shouldn’t test the temper of beings far more powerful and able.

They should reverence the gifts they were graciously given, treasure them like holy scriptures. They should humbly bow down and pray for mercy and kindness. They should know their place and rejoice inside its limits. 

But none of that matters now, because it’s time for consequences.


	2. Glory, Pest, Hunguer, and Death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh, naivety

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I live terrified of a zombie apocalypse, (that and an ecological apocalypse are my greatest fears) but what if ?  
> also lately everybody is talking about war... I am scared, do not fight people, there is always a better way.  
> English is not my first language so if there are mistakes please do let me know.

But no matter how incredibly pissed, how absolutely blinded might Hades be by rage and pain. To unleash Chaos upon humanity is not something she will ever do. Because, beyond feelings, duty and justice, she is a force of nature. 

Nature maintains a precious balance that ensures life on the earth, from the dispensable inconsequential to the vital magnificent; ants, forests and oceans, all connected and constantly beating; all related and dependent.

Humans, miserly savage and senselessly destructive as they can be; are also dear children of nature, part of a bigger and harmonious everything called world. They have the same right of existence and development as any other life form; not less, but certainty not more.

Thus Death will do what humans seem incapable of. 

Death will save love, the only way its capable of.

.

Two thousand and twenty years after the age of gods, human society collapsed like nothing before. Worse than war and politics, the crystal structures of society cracked and exploded, fell like snowflakes upon the vulnerable and the unprotected.

A calamity of immeasurable proportions, far beyond the power of any god that has ever existed, wiped cities all around the planet. 

Humans called it a pandemic.  
Because it’s easier to put the blame somewhere else than to carry it in the conscience; itching like a plague of fleas. Isn’t it? Who would voluntarily take blame for the sins, the grieve of millions? Who would give himself as a martyr, just to excuse the undisguised cruelty, the intentional ignorance, the infinite stupidity. Sacrifices are a desperate prayer, a naïve act of faith and submission, a last bloody struggle, a poetic finale;  
for someone else.

For gods, it was Consequences. Universal retribution. Fated, logical, simple effect; caused by the uncontrolled actions of men.  
All the red flags buried under the rug, all the carefully arranged lies, all the double-faced gory fantasies, all the hidden lurking monsters; came out of the shadows and preyed on the beautiful bubbles. 

And among sickness and smoke, among the scraps of normality and the ruins of order; humans still found time to hate each other. 

War broke out from de heart of old, cold tensions, obsolete grudges, and opportunistic greed; it came with vengeance, and like the gales of spring, tore down the last still standing fruits of hope. 

Like baby water fleas, wars devoured the countries that birth them from inside out; consumed the very people that sustained them; and the justice they preached was trampled by a glorious, undefeated Ares.

Civilization, Economy, Progress, turned their backs to humanity and walked away towards oblivion. 

Abstract constructions, those fragile and invisible concepts faded like old, nostalgic photographs of what it used to be an oppressive and insurmountable reality. Riches, opulence, comfort, are utterly worthless to men with infertile rice fields, over polluted rivers, and empty seas. 

Men does not feed of Gold.

It was rather ironic actually. The Glory of humankind was shaken by the blizzards of Pest; brought down to its knees by Hunger;

And saved by Death.

.

The green Persephone was trying to regrow form long dead branches will simply not come. His powers weren’t enough to heal the earth. Forests were pitiful remains of their previous thriving splendor; prairies were no more than dry, cracked soil with weak confused patches of yellow grass here and there; desserts were boiling cauldrons of despair; and gods were not the all mighty overlords humans made them seem. The limit of his power was never before more hurtfully evident and dooming. 

Persephone was dying, vanishing from existence. There is no final destination, no last dwelling beyond the land of the living, no Hades to go, when gods die.

Hades.

Beautiful, merciless Hades, all alone and broken. Will she miss him? Will she come and take his dead body back home? Will she come for him?

.

When the dead silently rose up from the earth; from misplaced piles of unburied, black sacks; from unassuming backyards; and ancient pyramids eroded by time and rain, when the severed heads grew limbs and bodies, emerged from the soil like maize. It seemed like the final rider had come for the harvest; the loss of hope at the end of the path, the ironic dying by the shores, the pith black resignation to fatality. Death would clean the remains of their waned and exhausted specie, just like the crows of medieval tales that preyed on the aftermath of holly crusades and starved children. 

It will be poetic, prophetic,  
pathetic. When has Death ever played by the expectations of men? 

No. The dead did not attack, did not pursued humanity to its biblical ending, did not mindlessly extended their arms and gracelessly reached towards the flesh of living. 

The perplexed, frighten mases weren’t important enough in the blackened eyes of walking corpses, whom had an all-powerful mistress and absolute orders. Thus men, impregnated in outdated ideals of Renaissance and anthropocentrism were, 

embarrassingly disregarded.

But seriously, will Death travel all the way from the underworld just to claim what is rightfully hers; what will inevitably droop in complete submission by her feet? How high has humankind placed itself that beliefs gods will deem it deserving of recognition, or validation even? Oh, that egocentric naivety of man, so foolishly adorable, 

so utterly despicable. Humans are just a drop of life in the great river. The waters of Mayu flow stuffed of thriving stars.

But for Hades, there is just one Persephone. Just one infected, polluted, ruined Earth he can live on. She has waited too much, expected to much, and almost lost too much. It’s time to take matters in her hands, and she has never been good with pleasantries. 

Yes. Humanity saw hordes of dead bodies inexorably approaching, surrounding them; and passing through. They didn’t stop for threats and blockades, they didn’t fear the guns aiming at them, not the shattering explosions. But then, they would find a tree and hug it, and every tree in their path, every wild herb and weed was embraced. 

Until they reached the woods, immersed in them like ants in an anthill, sealed nature permanently away from men; and an ominous thick wall of shadows and fog covered the borders. 

They didn’t shed a single bop of blood, but humankind lost more in day against Death that in centuries of primitive, fierce, belligerent clashes. 

Of course humanity tried to take back the forests, violently so. Of course they failed, miserly so. The dead will rapidly devour every living one that came through the fog. All technology will malfunction; all strategy will go inexorably wrong. 

Humans never knew what happened inside the mist. But they learned, miraculously, to keep far from it.

.

Hades came for Persephone, but she did not took him home. She carried his unconscious body to a sanctuary of green and shadows. She laid him down in a soft bed of grass and little flowers, closed her eyes, and fell asleep with her head by his heart.

It will be fine. Persephone’s energy will keep the ground warm and open; that will give humans enough time to start healing the soil and regrow a little bit of nature; and the dead will keep them safe, protected by rings of silent, loyal guardians. 

Eventually Hades, Persephone and the souls returned to Erebus, the guardians turned to stone, and the ancient heart of forests grew filled with warrior shaped rocks. Humans started adoring them like the heralds of gods, that came to teach men the ways of natural harmony, pacific coexistence, and a new prolific religion. A faith in love.

.

But that was hundredths of years ago. Stories of that time are so burned by age and guilt, so terribly tampered and corrupted that it’s hard to distinguish the truth form the myth. And even if humanity forgets the lesson, the stones remain in the forests, if you go deep enough you’ll see the rings of them, they are a warning. 

Humanity won’t get a second chance, Death is merciless, but fair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mayu, the great river: the milky way in ancient Andean lore and mythology. How Incas knew about the milky way without telescopes escapes my understanding. 
> 
> “when the severed heads grew limbs and bodies, emerged from the soil like maize” this is also from ancient Andean lore and mythology. Sometimes the things and traditions from foreign cultures that nowadays society deems bloodthirsty and gory, have profound meaning and it’s not always terrifying, ancient Andeans believed that the great warriors and kings of yesterday will be reborn and protect and lead them justly, and that is a thought that resisted Spanish conquest and colonialism. America is an incredible CONTINENT!

**Author's Note:**

> My neighbors want to cut down a mango tree in my back yard because the roots are breaking their walls and the floor... I am an Architecture student, i know how fucking difficult is to build something in this country, and how much construction waste harms the environment, but i also know the terrible consequences of cutting down trees for convenience and practicality... 
> 
> i still don't wanna cut down the tree, it was there first and is young and full of life. they were irresponsible in building less than three meters away from a tree. So this is tribute to my soon to be unjustly killed mango tree. 
> 
> i am impotent and it sucks. 
> 
> it sucks the joy out of my life.


End file.
